“Well, I don’t think we’ll be sailing down the Tigris anytime soon!” Quentin’s father laughed loudly at this, exactly as if it were funny, and then paused for thought. “Darling, do you remember that week we spent in a houseboat on the Volga . . . ?”

An extended Russian reminiscence followed, a duet punctuated by significant silences that Quentin interpreted as allusions to sexual activities that he didn’t want to know about. It was enough to make you envy the Chatwins, with Dad in the army and Mum in the madhouse. Mayakovsky would have known what to do with this kind of conversation. He would have silenced it. He wondered how hard that spell was to learn.

By about eleven every morning Quentin would hit his limit and flee the house for the relative safety of Chesterton, which stubbornly refused to reveal even the slightest hint of mystery or intrigue beneath its green, self-satisfied exterior. He had never learned to drive, so he rode his father’s white 1970s-era ten-speed, which weighed approximately one metric ton, to the center of town. Out of deference to its glorious Colonial heritage the town was governed by a set of draconian zoning laws that kept everything in a state of permanent unnatural quaintness.

Knowing no one, caring about nothing, Quentin took a tour of the low-ceilinged, heavy-timbered residence of some Revolutionary luminary. He inspected a boxy white-painted Unitarian church, est. 1766. He surveyed the lush flat lawns where amateur Continental irregulars had faced off against well-drilled, well-armed Redcoats, with predictable results. There was one pleasant surprise, hidden behind the church: a lovely half-vanished seventeenth-century graveyard, a little square glebe of ultra-green grass scattered with wet saffron-colored elm leaves, with a bent wrought-iron fence around it. Inside, it was cool and hushed.

The gravestones were all winged skulls and bad devotional quatrains about whole families carried off by fever, weathered in places into illegibility. Quentin crouched down on the wet grass to try to decipher one very old one, a rectangle of blue slate that had split in half and sunk halfway into the green turf, which rose up to meet it like a wave.

“Quentin.”

He straightened up. A woman about his age had come in through the cemetery gate.

“Hi?” he said cautiously. How did she know his name?

“I guess you didn’t think I would find you,” she said unsteadily. “I guess you didn’t think of that.”

She walked right up to him. At the last possible moment, too late to do anything about it, he realized that she wasn’t going to stop. Without breaking stride she grabbed the front of his barn jacket and marched him stumbling backward over a low footstone right into the aromatic branches of a cypress tree. Her face, pushed right up in front of his, dangerously close, was an angry mask. It had been raining off and on all afternoon, and the needles were damp.